World Socionics

Angela Dorothea Merkel is a German physicist, research scientist and politician who has been serving as the Chancellor (i.e. equivalent to prime minister) of Germany since 1998. She is not only the first woman in that position, but also the youngest when sworn in, as well as the only one with a background in natural sciences. She was born in 1954 in Hamburg, in what was then West Germany. Soon afterwards her family moved to what was then East Germany so that her father, a Lutheran pastor, could take a position in Perleberg, to the north of Berlin. Therefore, she grew up under East Germany's Soviet-aligned communist regime. Always a very good student - among other things she learned to speak Russian fluently - she studied Physics in the University of Leipzig. Like every young East German who wanted to have a chance of being allowed to go to university, she joined the official youth organisation FDJ (Free German Youth) which led to some minor controversy later, although by all a...

Edward David Wood Jr ., best known simply as Ed Wood , was an American film director, producer, writer, and actor, as well as the author of plays and many books, mostly novels. He has often been called the “worst director of all time”, having directed the supposedly “worst film ever made”, Plan 9 from Outer Space in 1956. Although he achieved little recognition in his lifetime, he later became a cult figure, a status consolidated by Tim Burton’s 1994 biographical film Ed Wood starring Johnny Depp.  Ed Wood was born in 1924 in New York to middle-class parents. Already in his teens he showed enthusiasm for films and film-making. He served as a marine in WWII in the Pacific, seeing combat several times and being wounded more than once. Discharged as a corporal, he moved to Hollywood in 1947 to start working as a filmmaker. Although able to get work in the mainstream movie and television industry as a writer and director of commercials and very low-budget productions, from the...

Heraclitus was a pre-Socratic Greek philosopher who lived in the city of Ephesus, at the time part of the Persian Empire. In his most active period around 500 BCE, Heraclitus postulated a distinguishing theory which he called "Logos" or an ora torical method used to convince or persuasion through logic. He is famously known for his central dogma of philosophy, universal flux, unity of opposites and that fire is element that comprises everything in the universe. The supposed interpretation of these doctrines has been the subject of controversy for historians, since his original inference often drawn from this theory that in the world as Heraclitus conceived - that these contradictory propositions must be true. What interested Heraclitus the most in philosophy was metaphysics and epistemology, which is a very internal subject, which thus gave way for Heraclitus to implore it with absolute confidence in detached monologues that took the form of a perplexing riddle or puzzle. ...

Osamu Dazai was a Japanese novelist, considered to be one of the most important storytellers of postwar Japan. While known primarily as a novelist, Dazai also earned recognition for his numerous short stories, including “Omoide” (“Memories”), “Sarugashima” (“Monkey Island”), and “Ha” (“Leaves”), which were published in Bannen, his first collection of short stories. Like most of his longer fiction, Dazai's short stories are autobiographical and reflect a troubled life marred by alcoholism, drug addiction, and several suicide attempts. Nevertheless, Dazai's fiction showcases his artistic imagination and unique confessional narrative technique. Of what is known of Osamu during his youth, was his obsession with Japanese communities and society, nearly to the point where he would feel extremely desolate and depressed when people didn't take notice to his lamentations on what would happen to these societies in the future. Osamu was also interested in idealized projections of...

Marcus Ulpius Traianus , later Imperator Caesar Nerva Traianus Augustus, best known as Trajan , was the 13 th Roman Emperor from 98 to 117. His reign is usually regarded as the zenith of the classical Roman civilisation, in terms of territorial expansion and political and military self-confidence. Trajan himself was associated with and largely credited for that zenith.  He was born in 53 in Spain, the first emperor not born in Italy. His father was closely associated with the Flavian emperors and so Trajan climbed easily the steps of the typical aristocratic Roman public career. He had already reached the highest levels of public office as the Emperor Domitian, a gloomy ruler of authoritarian inclinations, was assassinated in his own bedroom and succeeded by the elderly senator Nerva (IEI)  as emperor. Nerva’s brief reign was marked by politico-military meltdown, until he abruptly appointed Trajan as his successor, who at the time was serving as a military governor on the ...

François Gérard Georges Nicolas Hollande is a French civil servant, lawyer and politician who served as the President of France since elected in 2012 as the PS (Socialist Party) candidate, defeating the incumbent president, Nicolas Sarkozy ( LIE ), until leaving office in May 2017. Like the majority of French presidents and prime ministers since the 1970s, Hollande is an alumnus of the ultra-elite ENA graduate school. His classmates there included Dominique de Villepin (later Jacques Chirac’s ( SEE ) last prime minister) and Ségolène Royal (defeated by Sarkozy in the presidential election of 2007; Hollande's Minister of Ecology), who became his domestic partner and with whom Hollande has 4 children. On the one hand Hollande’s political career has been typical of his generation in the sense that he slowly climbed up the ranks of the PS through a succession of legislative and executive elective offices, until becoming First Secretary of the Socialist Party (that is, its nomina...

Alexei Maximovich Peshkov , primarily known by the pseudonym ' Maxim Gorky ', was a Russian and Soviet writer famous for his founding of the socialist realism literary method and political activism during the time of the Russian Empire. Maxim Gorky was known for his active participation in the Marxist social-democratic movement and his public opposition towards the Tsarist regime. His most famous literary works have strongly impacted Russian culture and have remarkably contributed very passionate insights within the field of short stories, poetry and memoirs that described the lives of people in the lowest strata and on the margins of society. He associated with fellow great writers of the time, like Leo Tolstoy and Anton Chekhov and greatly admired their works and contributions the the literary community at the time. In his pursuit of socialist realism, Maxim Gorky regularly emphasized the principles and rules that needed to be formed in order to implement the ideological ...